《瀬戸内「　」資料館》の第２回のテーマは、『百年観光』と題して、瀬戸内と直島の観光の歴史を調査発表する。
展示は、瀬戸内の観光や交通の歴史を調査し自作した「瀬戸内観光年表」と「直島観光年表」を、今回収集した既刊の「旅行書」とリンクさせつつ、時系列に並べて構成している（観光という言葉自体が作られ普及したのが近代以降で、実質的に『百年』程度と歴史は浅い。よって、観光年表は近代以降より制作した※1 ）。

現在「アートの島」として特集が組まれるほどの直島は、数十年前にはどのように扱われていたのか。調査はそんな素朴な疑問から始まった。そこで、瀬戸内や直島を扱った旅行書（ガイドブック）を、現在から過去へと徐々に遡りながら収集した。例えば『るるぶ』（JTBパブリッシング発行）の場合、瀬戸大橋開通の1988年に『るるぶ香川』『るるぶ山陽瀬戸内海』が発刊され、以降その両方に直島は掲載されてきた。頻繁に更新されていく多くの旅行書は、過去の物が非常に入手困難ではある反面、発見した場合は安価で簡単に入手できた。過去へ遡って旅行書を読み進める作業は、時間旅行のようだ。

瀬戸内の旅行書で面白いのは「観光コース／ルート」ではないだろうか。それは点と点を線で結び面にしたものだ。瀬戸内の観光は、一つ一つの点（目的地）は広大な地域に散らばっており、それらの点を多彩な線（船や鉄道や車や飛行機）の組み合わせでつなげていく。京都や東京などと比べると、アイコニックな目的地は多くないが、その分、広域に多様なバリエーションがあると言える。
開国以降から明治にかけて、欧米の旅行者によって絶賛された瀬戸内の観光は、船で通過しながら眺めるものだったようだ。さながら動画のような風景を楽しむことがメインの、広く面で捉える観光スタイルだと言える。さらに、『百年』前から日本人の間でも人気のあった瀬戸内の船旅も、大阪と別府温泉をつなぐ線（航路）上にあり、小豆島、高松、松山などの鉄道では行きづらい観光地が点となっていた※2。ただ、近年、観光の移動手段が変化していく中で船旅は廃れ、船から見る瀬戸内の素晴らしさは忘れられていった。
その中で、2010年に突如現れた“新しい観光コース”である瀬戸内国際芸術祭（以下、瀬戸芸）は、船での旅を全面に押し出し、多くの観光客を集めている。現代美術作品を小さな点として島々に配置し、そこを目的地として“巡礼”する楽しさに惹かれた人々は、道中で船に乗り瀬戸内の風景や人々と出会っていく。
一体この“現代アート”の巡礼は人々に何を与えるのだろうか。旅や観光は古くから宗教と結びつき、人々はそのご利益を期待し巡礼してきた。だが、もしかすると、宗教であれ美術であれ、目的地（置かれた点）はある意味で「フィクション／虚構」であり、実はそのプロセス自体（引かれる線）の方に意味があるのかもしれない。

今年3月、私は妻と娘とともにこの直島へ移住してきた。諸々の理由はあるが、私自身の生まれ故郷である瀬戸内の今をより深く知るために、ここに“住む”ことを選んだのだった。ただ、その直後に新型コロナウイルスが流行。4月16日には感染拡大防止のため、全国的に移動や外出が規制された。直島でも観光客は徐々に減っていき、ついに集落は静まり返った。島民たちは「アートがくる以前の30年前に戻ったみたいだなぁ」とささやき合った。観光客が絶えることのない直島が、島ごと数十年前にタイムスリップしたようだった。
直島という小さな島は約『百年』前より三菱の銅の精錬という巨大な産業によって潤ってきた。今でも人口の７割程度が三菱関連の仕事に就く。その直島が観光業に乗り出すのは1960年代から、三菱の機械化・合理化により人口が激減する中、三宅親連町長によって観光への大胆な舵きりがなされていくのがきっかけだ。ピーク時の7725人（1959年）から人口は減り続け、現在3000人程度。逆に、直島へやってくる年間の観光客数は、1990年に1.1万人だったのが2019年には73万人に膨れ上がっている。ただ、この10年で観光客が驚くほど急増している瀬戸内の”小さな島々”は、一方で人口減少に頭を悩ませている。

自然環境とそこに暮らす人々によって長い時間をかけて作られた「風景」は、外の目によって発見され美しい観光財産となる。風景は、さらにコンテンツ／イメージと結びつき、人々を魅了してきた。万葉集の枕詞や歴史絵巻の舞台、映画やゲームの中の世界、現代アートもそうだ。ただ、それらの外の目が作り出したイメージは、時間の経過と共に消費され忘れ去られる。時として、観光は長い時間で作られた風景の形を急激に変えたり、逆に見た目はそのままで中身はなくなり、形骸化させてしまうことがある。（例えば、古い街並みが有名になり保存されるが、観光以外の人々の生活がそこから消えていくケースなど。）長い時間感覚を持った眼差しで、風景と向き合い続ける必要があるのではないか。

私は観光学などの専門家でもなく、直島についてもまだ詳しくない。だから、本展示は私が瀬戸内や直島を調べて知っていく過程にあり、未完成である。この展示は歴史的事実を発見し発表したいのでもないし、自ら芸術品を創作して置きたいのでもない。私はこの展示（資料館というフィクション）を作りながら、『百年』の観光が累積したこの土地の地面を掘り進めるプロセス（線）自体を、展示を体験する島民や観光客と共有することで、瀬戸内や直島の未来を少し想像する場所にしたいと考えている。
最後に、今回、八十年代より新聞の直島の記事を切り抜き貼り付けた貴重なスクラップブックをご提供いただいた田中春樹氏、古い資料やポスターなどを提供いただいた直島町観光協会と直島町役場まちづくり観光課、そしてインタビューにお答えいただいた島民の方々に、この場を借りて御礼申し上げたい。

The second theme of the Setouchi “ ” Museum project is “100 Years Tourism”: a presentation of research into the history of tourism in Setouchi and Naoshima.
The exhibition comprises a Setouchi Chronology of Tourism and a Naoshima Chronology of Tourism, which I created based on research into the history of tourism and transportation in Setouchi and linked to previously-published guidebooks collected especially for this project. (The term “tourism” itself did not come into general use until modern times, and it has a substantive history of just 100 years. This project’s Chronologies of Tourism thus begin in the modern era*1.)
Today Naoshima features regularly in the media as an “art island,” but how was it viewed a few decades ago? This simple interest was the starting point for my research. I began collecting travel guidebooks that dealt with Setouchi and Naoshima, working gradually backwards from the present day into the past. In the Rurubu series (JTB Publishing), for example, the first edition of Rurubu Sanyo Setonaikai was published in 1988, the year that the Seto Ohashi Bridge opened, and Rurubu Kagawa was first published in 1990. Naoshima was included in both these publications thereafter. Many guidebooks are frequently updated and past editions are difficult to obtain, but wherever I could find them I was able to acquire them cheaply and easily. Reading through these guidebooks further and further into the past was something akin to travelling through time.

One of the intriguing features of guidebooks to Setouchi is their tourist courses and routes, which use lines to connect different points. In Setouchi tourism, the points (destinations) are scattered across a vast area, and connected with one another by a diverse combination of lines representing transportation by sea, rail, road, and air. There may be few iconic destinations compared to places like Kyoto and Tokyo, but instead there is great variety across a large expanse of territory.
From Japan’s opening to the outside world through the Meiji period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Setouchi tourism earned high acclaim among travelers from Europe and North America, who would take in the scenic views as they passed through the region by boat. This style of tourism mainly involved enjoying the scenery as a kind of moving image with a broad, superficial outlook. Trips through Setouchi by sea were also popular among Japanese people from 100 years ago, with Shodoshima, Takamatsu, Matsuyama, and other tourist destinations difficult to reach by rail featuring as points along the sea route that connected Osaka and the hot springs town of Beppu.*2 In more recent times, however, the means of tourist transport have changed: sea journeys have fallen out of vogue and the attractions of Setouchi as seen from the water have gradually been forgotten.
It is in this context that the Setouchi Triennale burst on to the scene in 2010 as a “new tourist route” that attracts many tourists to the region by placing sea travel front and center. Works of contemporary art installed on many different islands serve as points in the tourist route, with visitors fascinated by the idea of making a “pilgrimage” around these destinations and encountering the views and people of Setouchi as they make their way from point to point by ferry.
What exactly is it that people get out of this pilgrimage of contemporary art? Travel and tourism have long been intertwined with religion, as people journeyed from one sacred site to the next in anticipation of the benefits they may gain. However, regardless of whether the pilgrimage is for religion or for art, the destinations (points) between which travelers move could be seen in a sense as “fictions”: perhaps the real meaning lies in the process of movement itself (the lines drawn between the points).

In March this year, I moved to live in Naoshima with my wife and daughter. There were many reasons for this move, but I chose to take up residence here in order to gain deeper knowledge of Setouchi, the place I was born, as it is today. Just after we moved in, however, the novel coronavirus began to spread in Japan. On April 16, restrictions were placed on travel and movement outside the home across the whole of Japan to prevent the spread of the infection. The number of tourists in Naoshima gradually declined, and its communities fell silent. The locals murmured to one another that it felt like the days before art first came to the island 30 years ago. It was as if the whole island, which usually enjoys a constant stream of tourists, had been transported back in time to a few decades ago.
Around 100 years ago, the small island of Naoshima began to grow prosperous thanks to a giant industrial project in copper smelting established by Mitsubishi. Even today, around 70 percent of the island’s population is employed in Mitsubishi-related workplaces. When the population nosedived as Mitsubishi pursued the mechanization and rationalization of its operations in the 1960s, Naoshima made its initial foray into tourism under the bold leadership of mayor at the time, Chikatsugu Miyake. The population continued to decline from a peak of 7,725 in 1959 and now stands at around 3,000, but annual tourist numbers have ballooned from 11,000 in 1990 to 730,000 in 2019. Nonetheless, the “small islands” of Setouchi that have witnessed stunning growth in their tourist numbers over the past decade continue to grapple with the problem of population decline.

A “landscape” created over many years by the natural environment and the people who live in it is discovered by visitors from the outside, becoming an attractive tourist asset. This landscape becomes further interconnected with content and imagery that people find captivating. This goes for the poetic epithets in the ancient Manyoshu anthology, the scenes depicted in historical scroll paintings, the scenes of movies and computer games, and even contemporary art. However, the images generated by outside observers are consumed and forgotten over the course of time. A landscape that has been formed over a long period can sometimes be altered dramatically by tourism; it may appear unchanged but be divested of content or bereft of substance. An example is the case of an ancient streetscape that becomes famous and is carefully preserved, but devoid of any signs of life other than tourist visitors. Surely there is a need to adopt a long-term perspective as we continue to reflect on and engage with such landscapes.

下道基行（資料館館長）

01. Setouchi “Yoichi Midorikawa” Museum

The first theme of the Setouchi “ “ Museum project is Yoichi Midorikawa (1915-2001), the photographer born in Okayama Prefecture. We are holding an exhibition which investigates his work.
The impetus for this project was an encounter with the black and white photo series called “Shiroi-mura” (White Village, 1954) in the collection of Benesse Holdings. In this series, he photographed the post-war industries and people of Setouchi from a unique perspective.
One of Japan’s foremost photographers, Midorikawa remained a life-long “amateur” photographer, making his living as a dentist on weekdays at the Midorikawa Dental Clinic in front of Okayama Station, while on Sundays, he shouldered a backpack loaded with his camera and photography equipment to photograph Setouchi and many other places.
Midorikawa began contributing to photography magazines prior to WWII. He remained active, joining the photography group called Ginryusha (founded in 1947), which included members such as Shoji Ueda, Shotaro Akiyama, and Tadahiko Hayashi via an introduction by photographer and editor Ryosuke Ishizu, and influenced Japanese photographers in the pre-war and post-war eras. In 1960, he began capturing the shimmering waters of the Seto Inland Sea and the silhouettes of lighthouses and ships, etc., in color photographs. He established a style that incorporated unique painterly methods into his color photo depictions, consolidating his status as a photographer. Until his passing in 2001, he continued to engage with landscapes across Japan and his home of Setouchi throughout his life, leaving behind a large body of work.
While the “Shiroi-mura” series was shot using documentary techniques, it can be described as a turning point in his career, offering glimpses of Midorikawa’s unique painterly methods. It appears to be a distinctively balanced blend of the techniques of Ken Domon and Shoji Ueda, contemporary artists believed to have influenced Midorikawa. From 1960 onward, Midorikawa explored his own unique modes of expression, creating numerous series recording people living life vibrantly in the post-war era and the landscapes surrounding them. While many of them are collected fragmentarily in “Setonaikai” (Seto Inland Sea, Bijutsu Shuppan-sha, 1962), a collection of his early representative works, they have not seen the light of day in the form of complete series and photo collections. In recent years, attention has focused on Midorikawa’s creative activities in the pre-war and post-war eras, including an exhibition in 2005 at the Okayama Prefectural Museum of Art titled “Midorikawa Yoichi and His Circle, the Early Years: 1938-59” (Planner: Naruhisa Hirose) which meticulously covered not his color photos, but rather the black and white series he created prior to the 1960s.
In addition to the “Shiroi-mura” series, we also exhibit works such as “Yoru no tsuribune” (Fishing Boats on the Night Sea, 1954) and “Getsumei no umi” (Moonlit Sea, 1956). They were once permanent exhibits at the now-defunct Yoichi Midorikawa Museum of Art (1992-2001) in Saidaiji, Okayama in Okayama Prefecture, in which he used the painterly techniques that predate his color photos of the 1950s.
It also gathers Midorikawa’s photo collections, of which he produced more than 80 during his lifetime, and magazines he was published in, and sheds light on the personal files discovered in Midorikawa’s studio, carefully preserved by his family, which record his ideas for series shot during the period from 1940 through the 1950s, including uncompleted works.
In today’s art world, there is a tendency to treat the single original print of a photo as a work of art in and of itself, much like a painting. However, many Japanese photographers normally emphasize creating photo sequences or series which consider the relationship between photos, and this has imparted a special meaning to publishing photo collections as the optimal means of presentation. This has given rise to many photo collections of excellent quality, and helped to foster the culture surrounding photo collections in Japan. With the cooperation of his family, we will explore how Midorikawa engaged with landscapes and approached capturing them in a series of works from the photos shot and produced shortly after WWII and handwritten files on his series in the conceptual stages.
Finally, I did fieldwork for this project on many occasions at Midorikawa’s production studio, which is preserved as though frozen in time, and the repository of his works, and I was allowed to see many precious documents and photos. Sometimes, I meet the gaze of Midorikawa’s portrait for a moment, and as an active photographer myself, I imagine someone walking around my studio after my death, reading my unreleased files, and I feel a rather complex mix of emotions coupled with a heavy sense of responsibility. In engaging with photography and landscapes, he is a senior colleague to me, and my desire to study his surviving documents so that I might understand the thinking and handiwork behind his series has continued to grow. That is not to say that I was able to look through all of the many surviving documents during this project. If I can keep this museum open for the next few years, I hope to be able to continue my fieldwork, prepare it carefully, and open a new Setouchi “Yoichi Midorikawa” Museum.
In closing, I would like to take this opportunity to thank Midorikawa's family for their incredible support.